


Alone in Paris

by XaviaAndromedovna



Series: Daily Fic Drabbles Table A [8]
Category: Anastasia (1997)
Genre: Gen, Marie POV, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-20
Updated: 2013-06-20
Packaged: 2017-12-15 13:34:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/850116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/XaviaAndromedovna/pseuds/XaviaAndromedovna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Dowager Empress escapes with her life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alone in Paris

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Night

As the train sped away, Anastasia’s unconscious body fading with the distant platform, I finally let the tears fall for what had been lost.  Tonight was a night of unfathomable evil and pain.  My entire family, everyone I love—

I cannot speak it.  Perhaps in time the words won’t feel like rent skin, but on this train to Anywhere-but-here, I am unable to think anything but, “wake up, Anastasia.”

The air is bitter as we pass through the countryside, but the stars are beautiful.  There are a great many stars up there, and they shine incredibly bright for a night as dark as this has been.  I see so many unfamiliar constellations and wonder if one of them is my loved ones, watching down on me as I flee for my life, the last remaining member of the Imperial Family.

The train ride from St. Petersburg to a rural station farther west is much more crowded than I am accustomed to experiencing, and the other passengers give me inquisitive stares.  I don’t seem to belong here.  Conversely, I realize I am currently empress of a dream, so perhaps I belong more than they know.  I possess no tickets, so I hide in the baggage car.  Upon arriving in Smolensk, I stand in the queue for tickets to Minsk.  It gives me a strange sense of normalcy to do this; I am currently a refugee, fleeing the massacre of an entire ruling power, and I still have to do something as mundane as buy a ticket.  It’s as if I am simply taking an impromptu vacation to Paris, a perfectly ordinary night at the train station.  It makes me sick to my stomach.

Night turns to day and day to night again several times over on the way through the Empire, through Poland and Germany into France and the sparkling lights of Paris, but in my memory it is all the night I escaped.  I remember only black skies married to black landscapes on black horizons.  I remember a sickly moon waning into nothingness, and the incessant twinkling of indifferent stars.  I remember the screams of wind in a Russian winter, and the rest is a blur of sadness.

Somewhere in Poland I had the good sense to wire Sophie and tell her I was coming and why.  She awaits my arrival at the Paris station and smothers me in a warm hug.  She drives me to her house in the country and grants me respite and sanctuary, for which I shall never cease to be grateful.  When I gaze out the window, the skies are clear with Death’s sterility.  The time for sleep is now.  I’ve escaped.  Tomorrow may come.

**Author's Note:**

> Anastasia is not mine.


End file.
